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The Drone Papers

theintercept.com

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Re: The Drone Papers

#61

Post by waterlesscloud »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #18
whatafarce wrote: post #10

Utterly disgusting, America conducts clear war crimes, tortures, bombs afghan hospitals, assisinates, all without consequence. I'm sure some idiot will tell me to vote, because that'll change the systemic corruption and nightmare that has taken hold of US power. Did voting in nazi Germany help? No because they were voted in, voting only legitimizes a political system completely captured by insiders and corporate jugg…

Some alternatives to voting that come to my mind: - Figure out the real reason why the US is at war with "terrorism", and do everything to help develop and popularize technology that will make that reason obsolete. Is it because of oil? Then become a Tesla evangelist. - Keep talking, writing, shouting about the issue, shaming and blaming everyone even tangentially related to drone strikes. It's utterly ridiculous tha…

There was a Hollywood movie about the topic last year, GOOD KILL. It didn't get much attention or promotion and flopped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Kill

Re: The Drone Papers

#62

Post by MrJagil »

bambax wrote: post #48

This phrasing is incorrect: > [there are x persons] President Obama ha[s] authorized U.S. special operations forces to assassinate US special ops are the President's weapon. It doesn't make sense to say "yesterday I authorized my gun to kill a man"; what you want to say is "yesterday I killed a man". President Obama didn't "authorize targeted killings" or whatever you want to call those. He (and Bush before him) assa…

That's interesting. Wouldn't that logic excuse the "weapons" though? A common nazi excuse after WWII was that they were just obeying orders. That excuse seems to have been wildly disregarded.

Edit: Yes, I am very aware both parties should then be considered morally responsible.

Re: The Drone Papers

#63

Post by TeMPOraL »

xixi77 wrote: post #57
TeMPOraL wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I know that there are children starving in Africa, and can say this is sad and I am "very concerned", but otherwise it has close to zero emotional impact on me. It's an abstract issue. I actually feel about drone strike victim stronger , because I've seen the pictures, read the stories, seen the math. The point is, this issue is totally disconnected from the lives of most people. You need to get them invested e…

Well, why should people necessarily care about this issue more than about any of those? Also, just because people do not agree with you, does not always mean they do not care. Sure, there are many innocent victims of drones -- but your opponents can just as easily showcase equally innocent victims of Taliban or of Al Qaeda or of whatever group the people killed by drones belonged to.

> Well, why should people necessarily care about this issue more than about any of those?

Because their government is murdering innocent and helpless people in cold blood?

Yes, I sometimes forget that for general population, morality is inversely proportional to the square of distance...

> Also, just because people do not agree with you, does not always mean they do not care.

I know. I'm sure there are people who after careful consideration of their values and information available to them decided to support the drone strikes program. But I don't believe their number is anywhere near 60% of US population, or even 60% of people who responded to that poll.

Re: The Drone Papers

#64

Post by TeMPOraL »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #61
TeMPOraL wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some alternatives to voting that come to my mind: - Figure out the real reason why the US is at war with "terrorism", and do everything to help develop and popularize technology that will make that reason obsolete. Is it because of oil? Then become a Tesla evangelist. - Keep talking, writing, shouting about the issue, shaming and blaming everyone even tangentially related to drone strikes. It's utterly ridiculous tha…

There was a Hollywood movie about the topic last year, GOOD KILL. It didn't get much attention or promotion and flopped. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Kill

Never heard of it before. Thanks, definitely adding to my to-watch list.

Also, the list linked in that article is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_featuring_drones.

Re: The Drone Papers

#65

Post by dang »

rayiner wrote: post #24
whatafarce wrote: post #10

Utterly disgusting, America conducts clear war crimes, tortures, bombs afghan hospitals, assisinates, all without consequence. I'm sure some idiot will tell me to vote, because that'll change the systemic corruption and nightmare that has taken hold of US power. Did voting in nazi Germany help? No because they were voted in, voting only legitimizes a political system completely captured by insiders and corporate jugg…

Voting, by design, won't change something the majority of people want to keep happening: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/poll-support-drone-str... ("Fifty-eight percent of respondents expressed approval of U.S. drone strikes, while only 35 percent disapproved. This included nearly three-fourths of Republicans, slightly more than half of Democrats and 56 percent of independents."). "Insiders" and "corporate jugg…

You seem to assume that public opinion is an independent variable, but it's not. It shifts in response to elite opinion, media coverage, how poll questions are asked, and no doubt other things. It is as much an effect as a cause of the forces that shift policy; only in dramatic cases does it become causal. Appealing to public opinion to predict that the status quo will persist is therefore a historical fallacy.

There's an example of this in Boswell's Life of Johnson. Here is Johnson, the great English Tory, arguing in 1769 that general warrants are a non-issue because the public doesn't care:

[Johnson] would not admit the importance of the question concerning the legality of general warrants. "Such a power (he observed) must be vested in every government to answer particular cases of necessity; and there can be no just complaint but when it is abused, for which those who administer government must be answerable. It is a matter of such indifference, a matter about which the people care so very little, that were a man to be sent over Britain to offer them an exemption for it at a halfpenny a piece, very few would purchase it." This was a specimen of that laxity of talking, which I had heard him fairly acknowledge; for surely, while the power of granting general warrants was supposed to be legal, and the apprehension of them hung over our heads, we did not possess that security of freedom, congenial to our happy constitution, and which, by the intrepid exertions of Mr. Wilkes [1], has been happily established. [2]

It's striking how modern Johnson's arguments about general warrants—the mass surveillance issue of his time—sound now. He was probably correct about the public and could have cited polls had they existed. Yet that was far from dispositive: the American Revolution was imminent, and to Boswell, writing 20 years later, it is so obvious that Johnson was on the wrong side of history that he hastens to make clear that he (Boswell) wasn't.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkes

2. https://books.google.ca/books?id=qBFXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA255&lpg=P...

p.s. I hope it's obvious, but this is just a personal comment and not moderation-related.

Re: The Drone Papers

#66

Post by pkinsky »

MrJagil wrote: post #62
bambax wrote: post #48

This phrasing is incorrect: > [there are x persons] President Obama ha[s] authorized U.S. special operations forces to assassinate US special ops are the President's weapon. It doesn't make sense to say "yesterday I authorized my gun to kill a man"; what you want to say is "yesterday I killed a man". President Obama didn't "authorize targeted killings" or whatever you want to call those. He (and Bush before him) assa…

That's interesting. Wouldn't that logic excuse the "weapons" though? A common nazi excuse after WWII was that they were just obeying orders. That excuse seems to have been wildly disregarded. Edit: Yes, I am very aware both parties should then be considered morally responsible.

The Nuremberg trials established that 'just obeying orders' is no excuse, that acting as the tool of another does not absolve a person. That doesn't mean the person giving the orders isn't at least as guilty as the person who carries them out.

Re: The Drone Papers

#67

Post by darkerside »

pkinsky wrote: post #66
MrJagil wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. Wouldn't that logic excuse the "weapons" though? A common nazi excuse after WWII was that they were just obeying orders. That excuse seems to have been wildly disregarded. Edit: Yes, I am very aware both parties should then be considered morally responsible.

The Nuremberg trials established that 'just obeying orders' is no excuse, that acting as the tool of another does not absolve a person. That doesn't mean the person giving the orders isn't at least as guilty as the person who carries them out.

That's right, but it does mean there is a totally valid distinction between "authorizing" killings, and carrying them out yourself. The top level comment is blurring lines that shouldn't need to be blurred.

Re: The Drone Papers

#68

Post by canow »

bambax wrote: post #48

This phrasing is incorrect: > [there are x persons] President Obama ha[s] authorized U.S. special operations forces to assassinate US special ops are the President's weapon. It doesn't make sense to say "yesterday I authorized my gun to kill a man"; what you want to say is "yesterday I killed a man". President Obama didn't "authorize targeted killings" or whatever you want to call those. He (and Bush before him) assa…

When Obama says something meaningful, you can assume that it is a lie... like stopping the militarization of local city police forces with MRAPs and such (or not renewing the (un)"PATRIOT" Act..

Re: The Drone Papers

#69

Post by jrometty »

MrJagil wrote: post #62
bambax wrote: post #48

This phrasing is incorrect: > [there are x persons] President Obama ha[s] authorized U.S. special operations forces to assassinate US special ops are the President's weapon. It doesn't make sense to say "yesterday I authorized my gun to kill a man"; what you want to say is "yesterday I killed a man". President Obama didn't "authorize targeted killings" or whatever you want to call those. He (and Bush before him) assa…

That's interesting. Wouldn't that logic excuse the "weapons" though? A common nazi excuse after WWII was that they were just obeying orders. That excuse seems to have been wildly disregarded. Edit: Yes, I am very aware both parties should then be considered morally responsible.

Testing susceptibility to peer pressure in an individual mind is very a interesting idea.

Unfortunately, we can't accurately test it _yet_. A huge amount of data and tests -along with massive improvements in the understanding of the human brain- would be required to make a complete snapshot, without which testing isn't possible. We can't eve be sure this theoretical test is possible.

This alone wouldn't prove that their hands are clean, just that they wouldn't be as much to blame as someone who didn't succumb to social pressures and had more of a choice in the matter.

Re: The Drone Papers

#70

Post by meatysnapper »

AngrySkillzz wrote: post #59
poof131 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing that sending in ground troops would do is hopefully reignite the debate as to whether we should be in that country at all. Agree, but you're only part way. We really need to bring back the draft. On the ground in Iraq in 2008, watching ‘drone’ feeds of SF soldiers on missions on one screen and the stock market crashing on the other screen, all I could think about was “Don’t people care? There are soldiers…

Yup. No one cares until its their kid or the neighbor's kid getting shipped off to some far away warzone. While I disagree with the draft on moral terms, I think pragmatically it is the only way to properly align the incentives of the populace against wars that don't matter. Otherwise, the government can wage whatever wars they want and no one will be that bothered (as we've seen).

This cannot be stressed enough. A robotic military allows the government to wage wars with impunity because the average voter just doesn't care. If you have skin in the game, it would be different.

Perhaps a remedy for this would be to force the ranking members of congress to function as consuls, and make them live in Afghanistan for the duration of the conflict?

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